Half-time job guarantee solves better because it avoids benefits phase-outs. CP also spills over to normalize the 20 hour work week

But can workers and their families thrive on a half-time job guarantee?

Obviously, income from half-time work even at $15 per hour is not going to be a comfortable life, but because government supports have become more generous—particularly with policy changes made during the pandemic—a half-time job guarantee offers a reasonable safety net for working families.

Notably, Biden policies making the Child Tax Credit larger and refundable, expanding SNAP nutrition benefits, and enlarging the EITC for childless workers all help make half-time job guarantees more viable.

To put numbers on this, half-time work at $15/hr pays $15,060 per year. For a single parent with three kids, that will be supplemented by a $9,000 child tax credit (up to $10,800 if the kids are 5 or under), a $6,728 EITC payment and up to the maximum $10,020 yearly SNAP allotment, yielding a base of roughly $41,000 in annual income.

A table showing potential annual income for households enrolled in specific programs.

That can be further supplemented by child care tax credits (as much as an $8,000 credit at least temporarily under the American Rescue Plan), state supplements to the CTC and EITC (roughly $3,000 in New York City, for example), rental housing subsidies (substantial in amount but with limited availability), heating and other utility subsidies, as well as other supports such as discounted transit. Families and individuals at this income level also qualify for Medicaid, eliminating most health care costs as well.

Not a luxurious standard of living, to be sure, but these numbers emphasize that, program-by-program, progressives have made significant strides in making the lives of the working poor far better. A half-time job guarantee builds on these previous policy victories.

Perversely, as family incomes rise much above $20K per year, many of these financial supports begin to phase out, partly and at times completely offsetting any income gains. As the Congressional Budget Office found in one analysis, marginal tax rates can approach 100 percent for many low-income families. The Urban Institute has similarly found that additional wage earnings for working poor families can lead to little net gain in overall income.

That’s why aiming for a half-time job guarantee makes sense. The goal should be to treat such jobs as a safety net where workers are supported in eventually finding full-time work that provides not just more hours but substantially more hourly pay, delivering a real jump in family income.

Ensuring that these half-time jobs remain clearly distinct from permanent public employment will also reduce tensions with public employee unions. And instead of “stranding” participants in work they don’t like—as some critics of full-time job guarantees worry—people in half-time jobs will still be able to pursue educational, volunteer, or other part-time opportunities that can lead to better-paying careers. The point, as Pavlina R. Tcherneva of the Levy Economics Institute argues, is for a job guarantee to act as a transitional program, “a stepping stone…to other forms of private, public and nonprofit employment.”